


26:  Eddie Would Go

by light_source



Series: High Heat [26]
Category: Baseball RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: Hawaii, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-16
Updated: 2011-10-16
Packaged: 2017-10-24 16:41:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/265651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/light_source/pseuds/light_source
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>- It’s an edge-place, Zito had said, his eyes reflecting the grey sky - and all edge-places are haunted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	26:  Eddie Would Go

**Seattle  
January 2008**

As the plane banks towards the runway at Sea-Tac, cutting through veils of cloud, Tim studies the close-shaven head of the Marine in the seat in front of him and imagines what it’s like to be a soldier returning from a furlough. Your heart loses altitude along with the plane. Then your whole body’s arrested as the jet engines reverse, hauling you backwards into that place where you have no choice but to go.

After Tim’s weeks in Hawaii, Seattle seems bleak, paved-over. People’s faces seem to have absorbed the grey of the sky, and no one seems eager to get where they’re going.

Tim's hometown isn’t the Seattle people usually think of, the Seattle of tides and bald eagles and totem poles. Renton’s always been a place where people made things like trucks and airplanes. It’s where the big-rig eighteen-wheelers come from, the Peterbilts and Kenworths you see on the freeway. And it’s where the B-29 bomber was built, the plane that won the second World War. 

In wartime Renton, with all the men off fighting, people’s moms and aunts and sisters pinned their hair up and took off their engagement rings. They pulled down the faceguards on their welding helmets and built B-17s and B-29s, and they did it better than anyone else in the world. The B-29, like the people who made it, defied expectations; it was supposed to be for night raids and high altitudes but wound up mostly flying daylight and low. It was tough and agile, and it was lethal.

When the war had ended, and the government had canceled its bomber orders, seventy thousand people lost their jobs. But Renton reinvented itself; Boeing went on building airliners and cargo planes. They still do. 

Tim’s dad calls himself a Boeing lifer, thirty years in the purchasing division, and now he says he’s counting the days to retirement. He always summarizes his feelings about his job with the same sentence: _don’t get me wrong I’m happy to be employed but a trained monkey could do my job._

For the first few days Tim’s home, the house seems eerily quiet; the only phone that rings is his cell, and the clock ticks so loud in the kitchen that he’s taken to eating most of his meals out. He answers his father’s questions about Hawaii with a few monosyllables that his father is relieved to interpret as indifference.

Evenings are the hardest; his dad wants to them to watch tape together, and Tim just can’t face that, night after night. So when it’s not raining, he slips out of the house after dinner to the track at his old high school. After nine, he’s learned, the stadium lights always cut off automatically. Then the track in front of him fades endlessly into the dark and he can run long and hard till both his legs and his lungs start to burn.

When he doesn’t have anything left, while he’s walking to cool out, he lights a joint and counts the days forward.

//

For weight-training and machine workouts, Tim picks out a gym in Bellevue because it’s far enough away to justify staying out all day. Most days at lunchtime, he drives over to Sean and Sharon’s.

After six years of on-again, off-again dating, Tim’s brother Sean and his girlfriend Sharon got married last May, and they’re expecting their first kid in a few weeks. Their two-bedroom apartment is kind of cramped, and there’s a Pinoy family with five rambunctious kids in the other side of the duplex. But there’s a little yard out back, and a patio that Sharon’s filled with potted plants. And there’s Spike.

Sharon rescued Spike, a white-and-brindle pit-bull mix, from the animal shelter across the street from the dentist’s office where she works. She’d started stopping by on her lunch hour, and when she’d found out Spike was scheduled to be euthanized that week, she’d just _decided._ At first Sean was furious - the duplex’s too small, they’ve got a baby on the way - but now he says he can’t imagine life without Spike.

When Tim puts his key in the door, he can hear Spike keening on the other side, and she greets him ecstatically, her tail chopping the air as she licks his free hand.

\- In here, Timmy, says Sharon, her voice hoarse and high-pitched. The pregnancy’s been difficult, and she’s home from work for the final month.

Sean’s not here - he’s working a double shift today - and Sharon’s sitting at the kitchen table eating saltine crackers to quell the nausea that’s dogged her for months. There are dirty breakfast dishes stacked on the counter, a pile of newspapers on the floor, and Sharon’s eyes are bloodshot and lined - Sean’s worried that she’s not sleeping.

Tim’s brought her a takeout quart of Chinese egg-drop soup, one of the few things she can keep down these days, which he puts on the table along with the mail he collected from the box on his way in. She rubs her eyes.

He gets down a bowl from the cupboard and a spoon from the silverware drawer.

\- Thanks, Timmy, says Sharon, smiling wearily at him. Fragrant steam escapes from the container as she peels off the plastic lid and spoons some soup carefully into the bowl. - Want some?

Tim rubs her shoulder, awkward. - I already ate, he says.

Spike, her leash in her mouth, whirls like a tornado in front of the kitchen door, waiting.

She knows the drill: they walk around the block to the middle-school playing field and do a few circuits of its perimeter, with Spike heeling and stopping and sitting, watching Tim’s face carefully for a sign. Now that they’ve been doing this a couple weeks, she’s responding to the raise of his eyebrow, his open hand in the air, whatever’s NO in the language of her doggy world. Then she waits - and waits - for GOOD DOG, her favorite phrase. Then he’ll unclip the leash and for a frenzied half-hour they’ll play fetch with the frisbee, which is already holey from Spike’s teeth.

Watching the dog spin and scramble after his throws, Tim realizes he could pretty much do this all day long.

After a spectacular leaping catch, Spike finally spirals back to him and parks herself between his feet, her pink tongue lolling: enough.

He squats down to pet her and she looks up at him, one eyebrow cocked. As he absently scratches her head, he realizes that the white mark on her brindle forehead, an inverted _C_ trailing a comma, looks like a question mark.

On the way back, when they’ve stopped at a curb and Spike’s sitting quietly, waiting for a sign from him, he thinks about how much he wants a dog of his own.

But first he needs to get a place in San Francisco, and some certainty about where his life’s going.

//

Part of becoming a pitcher is learning to cordon off your feelings, learning to put that last pitch behind you whether you’ve struck out a batter or he’s hit you for a triple. Self-control becomes a reflex that shapes every other part of your life.

These days Tim doesn’t let himself think too much about what’s happened since September, or even about the insanity of last season, its wild swings.

The exception is when he’s running on the treadmill, when for some reason, the rhythm of music and heart and breath is sufficient to keep things contained. He doesn’t know why it works that way; it just does. When he’s running, he can let the thoughts and memories float up in whatever shape they choose. He knows he can make them disappear if he needs to by pressing STOP, and the world will fade to normal.

Today, as Tim watches his feet hammer the front of the treadmill's belt, he remembers last New Year’s Eve day, when he and Zito had made the long drive from Captain Cook out to South Point. As he increases the incline on the machine, he realizes he’s dropped his towel somewhere, and as the sweat drips into his eyes, blurring his vision, the memory comes back to him as though he’s right there.

//

The road that leads to South Point is winding and narrow, its edges crumbling into the volcanic shoulder, and as you get closer to the sea, the forest thins and eventually shrinks down to a few trees pushed sideways by the wind.

The two of them had scrabbled around the tidepools for awhile and watched the monk seals sunning themselves on the rocks. They were both pretty hungry - it was long past time to eat the lunch they’d bought hours ago in Miloli’i - so they’d hunkered down on the warm sand in the lee of a half-circle of boulders, taking refuge from the wind.

Zito had just about finished drinking the container of coffee he’d doctored with four creams and three sugars. Tim was eating the end of his sandwich, balling up the plastic film it'd been wrapped in, when he noticed Zito gathering small stones, black and grey and white, into a pile. When there were a couple of handfuls, Zito had scooped them up carefully and bundled them in the front hem of his pullover, apron-style.

\- C’mon, Zito had said, scrambling up to his feet. They’d clambered over the brittle black rocks, picking their steps carefully, farther and farther out towards the sea. The edge, when they finally reached it, was a cliff that dropped off abruptly into the impossibly turquoise ocean. There were seabirds rising and falling around them, their wings nearly motionless, riding the shafts of warm air.

It seemed like Zito was searching for something, and then Tim saw his eyes glint with recognition. With side of his hand, he'd swept the seaweed bits and shell fragments from the surface of a flat table-shaped stone near the edge. Then he'd emptied onto it the pile of small, smooth stones.

Tim had come over to watch, blowing on his hands to warm them.

\- This whole place is a _heiau,_ Zito had said, his voice even with the rush of the wind, - a sacred place.  People still make pilgrimages out here.  

\- It’s an edge-place, Zito had continued, his eyes reflecting the grey sky - and all edge-places are haunted.

Then, on the flat rock, Zito had arranged the small stones in a pattern, diamonds and squares, the colors and shapes repeating like a pattern on a carpet.

\- So I’m making a _heiau_ , he’d said, - it's for my uncle, my mom’s youngest brother. My name's from him. He disappeared the winter of '64 up in Big Sur - he used to go there to get away from things.  No one’s ever figured out happened to him.

Barry had sat down on another flat rock and hugged his knees to his chest, facing out to sea, his hair blown wild by the wind.

Meanwhile, Tim had started gathering some stones of his own from the crannied lip of the cliff. Then, on a nearby table-shaped rock, Tim had laid out a design different from Zito's.

\- Who’s it for? Zito had asked, kneeling beside him.

\- My grandfather, Tim told him. - You know he was born here, right?

Zito nodded. - He’s the one who died last summer?

\- Yeah, said Tim. - He’s the one. My mom’s dad.

The memory of what had happened was still vivid for both of them: it had been hot and dry, late August, nearly the home stretch of the season but not quite. The whole team had been tired, players steeling themselves for a series of away games. After he'd received the phone call about his grandfather's death, Tim had taken the minimum of bereavement leave, flown up to Seattle for the funeral and then hustled back to San Francisco to make his start against the Cubs.

That afternoon, Tim had come out of the dugout blazing, fierce. He’d pitched eight innings of two-hit ball and struck batters out right and left. Still feeling strong in the eighth, he’d convinced Rags and Bochy to let him complete the game. But then in the ninth he’d mysteriously lost it, giving up five runs _bang bang bang._

They’d given him the hook, of course. After the game he’d refused to talk to the press.

Days later, after his next start, Tim had told the reporters he’d been thinking about his grandfather that day, that he guessed he wasn’t entirely ready to be back.

\- My grandpa Asis was a boxer, said Tim, - welter-weight. So was my great-grandpa. But what _he’s_ famous for in the family is leading a strike against the sugar plantations.  His side won, Tim continues, - but he had a scar running up and down the length of his arm where he got slashed by a machete during a riot. He used to call it his flag.

\- Not the Phillippines flag, he’d say. Not the American flag.  He kept saying that even after Hawaii became a state. Those things aren’t real, he’d say, those flags, but this is. And he’d point to his scar.

And then Tim had straightened up.

\- Strange thing about this, he said quietly, looking at the design he’d laid out on the flat black rock - is that the stones just kind of arranged themselves.

//

Tim punches down the treadmill's speed to four miles an hour, a jog that matches the tempo of the U2 song on his Ipod.

That day - it'd been the last day of the old year, the cusp of the new. The ocean and sky had swapped colors, sky grey and ocean blue, and he and Barry had sat out there on the rocks till they were both stiff with cold.

Still, Tim hadn’t wanted to leave.

As they’d thrown their gear into the back of the jeep, Tim had asked Zito about the patchwork of peeling bumper stickers on the tailgate.

\- What’s with all the  _Eddie Would Go_?

\- Surfing contest, Zito had said, - an invitational, they have it every winter at Waimea - probably now, come to think of it - when the waves are really huge. Eddie is Eddie Aikau. He was a big-wave surfer who got lost at sea back in the seventies trying to rescue some people.

\- So when people say ‘Eddie Would Go,’ Zito continues, - they’re honoring that spirit - he was the kind of guy who’d give up his life to save someone else.

On the long drive back, the two of them had been immersed in quiet.   No talk, no music, no radio.  Just the roar of the engine and the wind whistling their hair around their ears.

Somehow, out there, they'd pulled down the spirit of the place and held it for awhile. It would be some time before the world would be back to its old self again.


End file.
